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The real Alice in Wonderland: Plus Alice in Miniland and Guinness Stout

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 966

Now that the new Tim Burton Alice film is out, let's not forget that there was a real Alice on which Lewis Carroll's Alice was based. She looks, well, pretty formidable. (Alice Liddell.)

A photo by Carroll of Alice at a younger age. In spite of his logic and math and Snark and Alice, Carroll's "artistic" photos of children are pretty creepy to me.

A great advertisement using Alice appears in LIFE in 1954, an early ad from Western Electric for microminiaturized electronics. So far as I can tell this is one of the very earliest popular ads for what will absolutely revolutionize the country over the next thirty years.

And of course there was a series of ads with literary backdrops for Guinness Stout, appearing in the 1940's and 1950's:

Comments

It's so hard not to read things into Dodgson's photos and the demeanor of the girls in them. The photos you link to include one comment: "Charles Dodgson's last portrait of Alice. Morton Cohen calls her "sullen," I call her pensive, perhaps sad. (1870)" I find myself hoping she had no good reason for being sullen before Dodgson's camera in particular. There is a creepiness to the photos, but I can't tell how much I am informed by modern speculation. It is certain that there is unfairness at play one way or the other. Ah, well.

Jeff: sometimes creepy is just creepy, modernist filter or not. I've seen LC's work and there's a lot of it that just reminds me of a post turtle. (Don't know how it got there, etc.) when I think of the exactness of his work in just about everything else, I would say that little in his photography was left to "chance". MAHENDRA: I have little doubt that she was spoiled (given the background and the times, etc) but I don't know about petulent. And so far as the Guinness goes: MIAB (meal-in-a-bottle) means BAIM backwards, and since neither means anything at all, then it all must be correct. Or soemthing.